The Best Unlimited Phone Plan: T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon Compared

“Unlimited” is a funny term. Unlimited cell phone plans often come with a long list of footnotes, terms, conditions, and exceptions. Mercifully, all of the Big Three cell companies have, by now, ditched throttling on their highest-paid tiers, and include 5G data access in all their unlimited plans. Yet there are still many differences in…

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Instacart’s AI-Enabled Pricing Experiments May Be Inflating Your Grocery Bill, CR and Groundwork Collaborative Investigation Finds

Update Dec, 22, 2025: Prompted by this investigation, Instacart has stopped offering technology that allowed grocery retailers to charge shoppers different prices for the same groceries at the same time. Learn more about that change, as well as legislative and regulatory responses to our findings. This article is part of Consumer Reports’ Make the Price…

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Best Toilet Paper for You—and Your Plumbing

If you’ve ever found yourself in a restroom with single-ply toilet paper you needed to use a lot of, you know what I mean.  Comfort and softness are critical to a good roll of toilet paper, but other factors come into play as well. We tested 15 different types of toilet paper through rigorous testing…

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Should You Top Off Your Car’s Gas Tank?

Adding more fuel after the gas pump clicks off can damage the charcoal canister by saturating it with fuel and cause the check-engine light to illuminate. If the ORVR is damaged, it won’t adequately capture those harmful vapors. The system typically lasts the lifetime of a car, but topping off could lead to an avoidable…

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Research Reveals the Optimal Way to Optimize

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at UC Berkeley, George Dantzig—a first-year graduate student—copied two problems off the blackboard, thinking they were a homework assignment. He found the homework “harder to do than usual,” he would later recount, and apologized to the…

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